The Lone Sysadmin

Microsoft stopped selling Windows XP Professional and Home yesterday. For as much as people complained about XP in the beginning it evolved into an OS that was solid and consistent.

Sure, Vista has succeeded XP in just about every area, but Vista is a design and usability nightmare. The Network control panels are a great example of the half-assedness of Vista. Especially anything having to do with IPv6. Or, seen another way, I find it a lot more difficult to talk my mother through things on her computer now that she’s running Vista.

Even the six different ways to shut a Vista machine down are confusing, and how hard is that to do right?

Goodbye, old friend. Our seven years together wasn’t perfect, but we sure did get a lot of stuff done.

You’d think someone would have come up with a solution to this by now:

Perhaps the solution is, instead of splitting the primary monitor, split the SECONDARY monitor and put the image there. Having not messed with big displays like this I have no idea, but it seems like there isn’t a lot of thought going into the screen many thousands of people are looking at.

I saw that at Summerfest in Milwaukee yesterday. I was over there to see Michael Franti & Spearhead, as well as Jack’s Mannequin. As a lighting designer I tend to watch the lights during shows, and the addition of a hazer to the stages, and a bunch more moving lights, makes for a good show. Franti is always a good time, Jack’s Mannequin sounds a lot different than in the studio but their energy is incredible, and I also stumbled into Ryan Shaw’s performance. That guy has an amazing voice, and proves to me that while I’m not usually a big R&B fan there’s parts of every genre I enjoy. Good beer, decent weather at the end (cool, not raining), and great crowds made for an excellent time, even if I did get home at 2 AM.

P.S. Sorry for the crappy photos, I left my camera at home and the iPhone doesn’t cut it.

I just bought a new red ink pad for my big rubber ICKY stamp. Hours of fun, wandering the building stamping things. Problem is, everybody knows it’s mine.

Am I missing something here, or is this one hell of a typo? Stealed? I found this last night in the FedEx Kinko’s “What’s your sign?” brochure, while waiting for them to make easy work of my huge icky print job. Click on the image for a larger version.

Maybe the Kinkos guy in the photo is actually taking the banner away from the customer. If it is just a typo maybe the fix could also remove the lame cliches.

On August 8th, 2005 I started this blog. It is almost three years later and this is my 1001th post.

Of those 1001 posts, 364 of them were auto-posted from my del.icio.us bookmarks.

There have been 994 comments so far (thank you!) though some of those are my own replies, too. There have been 127,622 spam comments (no thank you), mostly all of them caught by Akismet (thank you).

I have uploaded 95 things to the blog, whether they’re photos or something else.

This blog is #1 in Google searches for “esxcfg vswitch,” and #2 in searches for “when you do things right people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” I occasionally search for things in Google and get my own site as a result (four times). Better is when a coworker searches for something and gets my site (twice). Best is when a customer searches for something and finds my site, then sends me the URL as something I should read. Heh. It takes four minutes for posts here to appear in the Google search results.

According to FeedBurner I hit a consistent 2^9 readers, via RSS, a few weeks back (hello there!). I consistently get another 2^9 folks coming straight into the site from other sites and search engines, many from the VMTN and Planet Sysadmin aggregators. Exactly 50% of my readers use Google Reader.

So in conclusion, dear readers, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed this blog so far, and it’s really because of all you folks that read it, comment on it, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’m right, tell me I’m nuts, invite me to conferences, drink beer with me, and basically make me glad I’m not just talking to myself. :-)

Whose fault is it?

It doesn’t matter. Get the problem fixed.

You can figure out who is at fault when you’re discussing how to prevent the problem in the future.

Dear WWDC keynote people,

Just shut up and tell me about the new iPhone hardware. I don’t care if the AP has an app to show me news. Boooorrring — I have that already. It’s called Mobile Safari. And MLB.com, why don’t you make your main web site less of a pile of crap, instead of making an app for the iPhone? And why isn’t it free? You are still losing to totallyscored.com, as far as I can tell.

Also, anyone want to start a pool on when the first marriage ends because of Loopt?

…Bob

Overheard at the grocery store yesterday:

“Oh my God, Doug, there you are. We’ve been trying to find you. They need the M-O-D at the service counter, there’s a lady there going absolutely nuts.” I’d been listening to them page the M-O-D for ten minutes, and I’d been watching this guy help bag groceries for five.

“What’s the M-O-D?” he asked.

“Manager on Duty,” said in the snottiest voice she’d talk to her boss in. “That’s you.”

I bet if they’d paged a MANAGER he would have responded. Which makes me think about all the jargon I use on a daily basis. Given that people won’t generally ask for clarification when they don’t understand something because they don’t want to feel stupid, how do I know that they’re on the same page as me?

Best bet might just be to use less jargon.